Accelerating digital transformation with a focus on innovation

Digital culture is predominant in the 21st century. Digital is an inseparable part of our lives now. Women have been the major contributors to the promotion and integration of technology even in areas that lacked knowledge of digital. Adhering to digital dissemination and transformation, Jaqueline Teo of HGC Global Communications is instrumental in making digital transformations and innovations ubiquitous. Emphasizing more on this, Jaqueline talks about the factors that steer her towards digital transformation for a strong digital adoption and adaptation.

Featuring in “The 20 Powerful Women in Technology”, Jaqueline Teo shares her valuable insights on digital transformations and her experience that helped her to take a step into the technology sector and initiate digital innovations and transformations. Here is the gist of the interview.

Brief us about HGC Global Communications along with your role as the CDO

My background is in Finance and I started as a junior accountant when I graduated. My break-in technology came from my love of travel and I joined a technology consulting company. It so happened that one of my first clients was a Telco company and I was inspired by how technology could change our lives. At that time, 3G and smartphones were emerging and the world was moving from ADSL to IP, copper to optical fibre. SMS was the word du jour and enterprises ran on Frame Relay. With that, I started the 25-year journey that has taken me around the world and allowed me to be a part of some of the most amazing technological advances that continue to influence our lives today.

I am the Chief Digital Officer for HGC Global Communications. My role is to enable digital transformation for HGC, across people, processes, and technology.

What are the factors that contribute to your success?

I work in fairly male-dominant environments. Early in my career, I was one of the few women in technology, in the engineering-based telecommunications and media industry. In addition, my work was mainly based in highly conservative and hierarchical cultures that would place younger women in stereotypical roles.

I, therefore, learned very quickly to face setbacks, pushbacks, challenges, confrontations, provocations, conscious and unconscious biases. There weren’t as many strong female role models in those early days. The behavior I observed and adopted was a mirror of the environments I was in. And I often wondered why I felt stressed and constantly pressured. It just wasn’t authentic.

Over the years, I have been determined (and fortunate!) to find the right mentors and supporters – male and female, younger and older, within and outside my industry – in my journey to authentic leadership. I have come to understand that I need to be true to my values, focus on my strengths and make this my own story. And I learned that you can’t do this on your own. You need people in your corner, keeping you on track, giving you honest feedback so you can grow. I often err on the side of having a voice and call things out, rather than be a bystander in this world and go with the politically correct or popular thing to do. While this has not always been easy, my support group has been there to keep me focused and balanced.

One of the greatest influences for me was the emergence of software engineering and the implications for systems architecture and integration. Agile methods, extreme programming, and code quality were starting to gain a following. In the late 90s, I remember devouring the works of Watts Humphrey, Kent Beck, Barry Boehm, Ken Schwaber, Christopher Alexander, etc. Back then, the concepts were not well understood and they were disparate concepts. Back then, the concepts were applied inconsistently and it took a lot of trial and error to refine the practices and attain the outputs desired. They were pioneers in their field and not afraid to push the boundaries. This is, to me, is how the digital space works – pioneering new experiences, continuously learning, being curious, having the courage to try new things, and the passion to stay on your journey.

What, according to you, are the vital attributes that a leader should possess?

Transformational leaders often need to balance vision with delivery ability, limitations/constraints of resources (human, financial, environmental, physical), and change adoption. Often our stakeholders are diverse and hence soft skills such as effective communication, influencing, and building strong connections are a must. My top three attributes for every transformational leader are:

Care about people – genuinely
Ultimately, people enable change and you will need others to have the same vision, energy, and passion as you. To garner such support, you need to enable others to do what they do best. Leadership is about building on the strengths of others, empowering them to take the lead, and encouraging them to achieve beyond what they can imagine. Always remember it is your privilege to be instrumental in someone else’s success. So focus on their success first.

Resilience
By definition, transformations require some sort of change. The impact on individuals tends to be very personal – some may be indifferent, some resistant, while others are more accepting. As a leader, you are leading people (directly and indirectly) into unfamiliar territory. Perseverance, having empathy, and always being curious as to why things are the way they are, are important. This can get physically and mentally tiring and you can feel that the world is against you or does not understand you sometimes. Leaders need to build resilience not only for themselves but also in their teams.

Humility
Transformational leaders need to have the humility to learn as well as to unlearn. Recognize that everyone brings strengths to the solution and your best contribution is bringing together those strengths to create an outcome. Much like the conductor of an orchestra.

This is especially true when creating new digital models, using design thinking, applying artificial intelligence, and innovating customer experiences. Consider yourself a part of the other person’s journey and use the opportunity to be part of their legacy.

How do you innovate your products/solutions?

Digitization is largely dependent on people – their ability to imagine a solution, their resilience and the stamina to deliver, their acceptance of the change, and their willingness to coexist with the solution.

Innovation is therefore not just in technology but also in the conversations and methods I apply to include people in the journey. This normally involves constant consultation, user trials, testing new concepts iteratively together, creating a space for open and safe discussions where I make sure everyone has a voice. Mostly, I work on motivating people to be engaged in joint outcomes and making sure they have clarity in how they contribute to the result.

How are disruptive technologies impacting innovation and leadership?

Innovation in the virtual world is complimented by new opportunities to innovate in the physical world. People can focus on creativity, innovation, and design for business outcomes. More time can also be spent in experimentation and research of new products, user experience, customer intimacy, and delivering personalized services.

Today’s business landscape is extremely competitive and constantly changing. Leaders have extraordinary demands placed upon them to deal with conflicting demands. You have to innovate while transforming and maintain a steady operation while driving change. On top of that, the changing social landscape especially brought on during the pandemic, has brought new perspectives to what keeps a person motivated. Leaders now need to practice more value-based leadership that gives importance to ethics and humanitarian principles. They have to demonstrate authenticity and know-how to engage in the face of topical issues such as inclusion, fairness, social justice, environmental responsibility, etc. These values are relevant when defining parameters for ethics and bias in AI, incentive alignment potential of ML, ethical use of data, a consequence of using social data to influence new consumption behaviors.

In addition, there is an emerging workforce that has spent most of their time by themselves (physically) in the virtual world. The pandemic has driven school online, mobile games and social media platforms to be the top entertainment categories and the lack of borders in a digital world distorts the traditional concepts of personal connections and relationships. Attracting and leading your next generation of leaders will need you to shift your mindset of a ‘job’:

• Understand these new ways of thinking and new motivations
• Break traditions on titles, roles, and hierarchies. Jobs that exist now are not likely the ones they want nor the ones that are needed in the future
• Be creative on what career development means. In this digital age, 18 years old can become their own CEOs and they know it. So ask yourself constantly what can I offer them, not why should I hire them.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Content and social use will continue to drive demand for high-speed connectivity. Technology advancements in Wi-Fi (such as OpenWifi), 5G, and satellite to terrestrial integration are poised to meet these expectations. In addition, the evolution of intent-based networks, leveraging software-defined architectures (SDN, SDWAN, etc), virtualization of networks (NFV), alongside endpoint evolution (IoT, sensory, chips, cybersecurity, edge applications, data, enriched experiences, etc) and revolutionary compression algorithms will continue to disrupt the telecommunications industry.

As a result, telecommunication companies have emerged as one of the most essential industries during support of the new normal and this will most likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. The Telco’s role in enabling remote working, virtual collaboration, seamless delivery of products, services, and customer experiences by utilizing cloud technologies, is expected to continue. Its challenge will be to evolve quickly and pivot with their customers as their industries too, get disrupted. This can cause conflicts in focus and challenges with resource allocation and priorities. Telcos will continue to an important component for our digital future but they need to put the extra effort into brand and customer engagement to remain relevant to customers.

In addition, expansion to adjacent industries such as cloud providers, IT solutions, and systems integrators that offer similar or complementary solutions will continue to create competition in our periphery. However, that is where we expect our customers to spend a significant part of their budget. The Telco partner ecosystem will therefore need to become more open to enable easy onboarding, collaboration, and integration with partner solutions. In the vast sea of such solutions, we will have to continuously review our strategies and have robust governance in place to ensure we invest where it matters and stay relevant to our customers as things change.

What is your advice for budding or emerging women leaders?

Three things I would say to my younger self:

#1 The world is a big place. Whatever happens today will be tomorrow’s past. Learn, move on, and be determined to a better version of yourself every day.
#2 Lead with grace and kindness. Remember those who supported you, and how they helped you to where you are today. So make sure you support others in that same way.
#3 The worse answer you will get in life is a “No”. So if you know that already, dare to go for what you want. There are only infinite ways to win from that point. One quote that inspires me to keep going is: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take (Waye Gretzky)”